


there will be mountains you won't move

by roadtripexpert



Series: from a past life, future light [2]
Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Angst, Apocalypse vibes, Carol the therapist!, Found Family, Gen, Joe and Nicky are mostly background, Loss, Mentions of Racism, Nile POV, Past Character Death, Russia, The Mortifying Ordeal of Being Known, Therapy, with a sprinkle of optimism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-19
Updated: 2020-07-19
Packaged: 2021-03-04 20:21:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,258
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25382257
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/roadtripexpert/pseuds/roadtripexpert
Summary: Years and years later Nile finds herself in therapy
Relationships: Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Series: from a past life, future light [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1958098
Comments: 8
Kudos: 233





	there will be mountains you won't move

Years and years later Nile finds herself in therapy.

She’s talked to the others about it, all of them too old to understand how it could potentially help them. Joe and Nicky have no interest, Booker brushes off all her half-subtle attempts to make him go, Quynh laughs at her, all wildfire and teeth, something dangerous behind the eyes that says: _in my own time_. 

Nile was never interested in therapy in the Marines. It was required, often in groups, so that Nile felt raw, exposed, wanting to crawl out of her own skin before talking about her father’s death. 

The woman in front of her has short hair ( _l_ _ike Andy’s_ , Nile thinks, then quashes it). Bleached blonde, and she’s dressed for a century ago. It almost makes Nile nostalgic, a feeling that takes on a different meaning every new year she lives. She’s walking through memories now, it’s in the air she breathes. Soon there won’t be enough space between the molecules. She wonders if she’ll suffocate. 

_No,_ she thinks, _just forgot._ And it’s with such world-weariness she almost laughs at herself. 

She wonders what she can say to this woman, Carol, Nile reminds herself, as she has to with every person she knows will die before she does. Carol is looking at her without judgement, legs tucked up in front of her, more casual than any therapist Nile’s ever met. Their current cover-man recommended her, but Nile’s still wary. 

What’s even on the table? Memory? Loss of identity? Calcified trauma? How she feels every day in her bones like the best and worst thing to ever happen to her? God? 

_There's a flash of Andy and Quynh getting married on a bluff in Scotland. They hadn't planned it. Quynh was still weary of the waves breaking on the rocks. Nile had sat with Nicky and Joe on the dew-stained grass and cried silently the whole time. It had felt so huge, so unimaginable, that of all their time on earth she would get to witness that day._

She realizes she must look panicked, and out of it, because the woman is putting out a calming hand, saying softly. “Hey, deep breathes. How are you feeling today?” 

Nile shrugs. “The same as always I guess.” It’s mostly just for something to say. She has been feeling stagnant. The closest she's felt to depression in many decades.

“It’s a hard time for all of us right now,” Carol suggests with her hand towards the open window. 

Nile lets out the deep breath she’d been holding. She can deal with this. Carol is referring to the wars and the uprisings and the droughts. Famine, refugees fleeing climate change. Bread lines in the global south. Privatized everything. These are the things that Nile knows better than breathing, the broad strokes of suffering that her family deals with daily. 

Joe joked that it felt like biblical times again.

“Did the biblical times have running water?” Nile asked with a raised eyebrow. 

Booker laughed at that, an achievement that Nile always cherishes, and that makes Nicky and Joe go momentarily soft around the edges. 

And then Nile had to cover Quynh’s mouth, her wicked smile a precursor to a dark joke about water that would remind them that Andy wasn’t there to get unduly upset about it. 

Nile isn’t in therapy for the state of the world, but it might be a good place to start. “Yes,” she says, “sometimes I think about how long we’re going to last, how long the planet will last.” 

Because she does. 

“Are you particularly fixated around the end of the world?” Carol asks. 

Nile almost laughs, and wonders how she can tell this woman that every day feels like the end of the world. And then they start talking in earnest.

They linger on her father, as Nile dutifully recites the expected traumas. The truth is that she’s recovered from her first family’s deaths, something that sometimes makes her feel like a terrible person, but which she knows is really just time. 

She came to terms with her family’s passing better than Booker. She was there when her mother died, hidden behind a hospital divider. Her mother’s eyes had found hers anyways. 

“Oh, my baby!” 

“What is it Momma,” her brother had said, the most gentle hand in her hand. 

“I see Nile,” her mom was crying and smiling like heaven come home, “I see my baby.” 

She had passed like that, smiling, tear tracks down her many wrinkles. Her brother and the rest of her extended family smiling and laughing and crying all at once, embracing. Nile had left before she broke and joined them. 

“But I feel at peace,” she explained to Andy, a century ago, without knowing exactly how many days she had left with her. “I felt right.” Andy had nodded and then pulled Nile’s head into her lap so that she could sob out sounds that she hadn’t known she needed to make. 

She always felt adrift with Andy. Nicky and Joe were her rock, solid and unwavering, Booker was at least reliable in his moods. Quynh, reliable in her chaos. 

With Andy, Nile was always charting the time spent, trying to chart the unknowable end, tamping down panic. It wasn’t bad, unmoored on the sea that was Andy, terrifying, yes, but beautiful too. 

Nile misses it more than a limb. 

She looks out the window. She knows now what it feels like to be a product of another age. They’re in St. Petersburg, Russia. Nile remembers arriving there for the first time, her Russian shaky, turning heads with her melanin. 

Not as though the world has fixed itself, but systems have eroded, adapted. Her blackness doesn’t mean the same thing it did two centuries ago. 

Her childhood, her life before Andy, as she likes to think of it, is an anachronism. 

So, she’s being careful with the language she uses to talk about the experiences that she had in the army, the ways she’s been treated, the first person she killed.

It all feels too antiquated to talk to this woman about. They speak about the man she killed in Afghanistan without mentioning the thousands of people she’s killed since. 

Carol seems to pick up on this discomfort. “You have something else you’d like to talk about, right?” she asks.

“Yes.” Nile takes a deep breath. She thinks about Andy’s arm around her shoulder the first time Nile came to this city, her laugh, her stubborn, ancient eyes, the way she and Quynh wrapped themselves around each other, the glorious few decades where they were all together, the six of them. 

“Yes. I lost someone.” 

Joe and Nicky meet her at a cafe a few blocks away. 

“How did it go?” Nicky asks, sincere in a way that still breaks down every barricade Nile has, even to this day. 

“Good, I think,” Nile says, like she hadn’t just bawled her eyes out for twenty minutes in front of a complete stranger. “Really good.” 

Joe gets her a chocolate croissant and they sit in comfortable silence for a few minutes, soaking in the late afternoon sun, watching the regular babble of the world walk by. It’s the last of the Russian summer, and they’ll be leaving soon, flung into distant corners with only each other and the great planetary clock for company. 

Nile watches the peaceful sweep of Joe’s thumb over Nicky’s hand, and then looks back up at the sky, blue even after the end of the world.


End file.
